‘Two Prosecutors’: A Movie About a Russia That Cannot Bring Itself to Be Any Different

There are works that do not require a review in the conventional sense — they require a testimony. Two Prosecutors is precisely such a work.

The film is a co-production of six European countries — Latvia, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Romania and Lithuania. It is an adaptation of the novella of the same name by Georgy Demidov, a physicist from Kharkiv who spent fourteen years in various Gulag camps. The novella was written in 1969, but the fate of the text itself is a metaphor in its own right: the truth that is buried alive yet survives nonetheless.

The film recounts the events of 1937 in provincial Bryansk. A young prosecutor, Alexander Kornev — an idealist raised to believe in socialist justice — receives a letter written by a prisoner in his own blood. He tries to understand who the author is and how the events described could have happened.

But the most terrifying scene in the film is not in Moscow. It takes place at the exit of the Bryansk prison. Kornev has just seen the prisoner — a living body, covered in scars and fractures, still breathing and still remembering his name. And now he is walking towards the exit. And there — a wall.

Several NKVD officers block his path. They simply stand there. Watching. Five seconds. Seven. A silence that weighs more heavily than any sentence.

This is not a threat in the usual sense. No one says a word. No one touches him. But the look — that very look of people accustomed to deciding who stays on this side of the wall and who goes to the other — says it all. You saw what you were never meant to see. You are already on the inside. You just don’t know it yet.

Kornev walks past. He didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to understand — because to understand would mean admitting that the system he believes in does not exist.

And again — that same rupture. The viewer freezes. Kornev walks on. And in those five to seven seconds of silent regard, the director has compressed everything there is to know about a state that needs no words to destroy a person.

The prosecutor makes his own small, fearlessly naive attempt to right an injustice. Loznitsa sought to recreate the atmosphere of a paranoid mechanism of fear, in which a person becomes a cog in the system without even realising it. Kornev is a cog who decides to think. That is enough to seal his fate.

The scene in which he travels to Moscow and, against all odds, manages to secure an audience with the Prosecutor General of the USSR, Andrei Vyshinsky, is striking in its sheer ordinariness. No demonic grandeur. No villain’s bombast. Just a bureaucrat detached from the people, spouting polite nonsense about “bureaucratic paperwork” and “we’ll sort out the culprits”. After these words, the viewer already knows everything about Kornev’s fate. Kornev does not. And in this gap between the viewer’s knowledge and the protagonist’s blindness lies the full horror of a system that destroys not through hatred, but through indifference.

Oleksandr Filippenko gives a towering performance in two roles: a tortured prisoner, a former party member who wrote that very letter in blood, and a retired soldier encountered by chance on a train — a man who once tried to reach Lenin and ended up imprisoned for his persistence in seeking another audience. Now, he declares, he is on his way to see Stalin himself. The scene is a warning to Kornev that he entirely fails to heed.

This duality is neither a gimmick nor a display of acting range. It is an architectural decision: the system produces the same type of victim endlessly, with different names and faces. A warning of fate that Kornev could not recognise — for who would recognise it when they are still alive and full of faith in the righteousness of the law?

So: a film about the Gulag — with Russian émigré actors in the lead roles, a co-production of six European countries, shot in Latvia. The film is in Russian. The film is essential. And the film is deeply controversial — not in an artistic sense, but in an existential one.

Two Prosecutors is a film about how a good man perishes through honesty in a society where honesty is a crime. Kornev did nothing wrong. He simply refused to pretend that a deaf ear was a response to a letter written in blood. And the system swallowed him — not out of malice, but because that is how it is designed.

Today, as Ukraine once again faces that very same system — now with missiles rather than NKVD warrants — this film takes on a significance that goes far beyond film criticism. It is a reminder: this machine has been operating on the very same principles for seventy, eighty, ninety years. It does not reform. It reproduces itself. And the only answer to it is not the naive Kornev, but a people who have chosen a different path and are holding fast to it with weapons and will.

The film was made outside Russia. But the truth it tells is about Russia — and not only about its Prosecutor General, but about the people who endure and sustain such a regime. And that is precisely why it matters. Despite everything.